Pre-Academy reading: Selecting a sales network
Bolting an online advertising sales network onto your business can be a powerful way to boost revenues without detracting from the role of your sales teams or encroaching on the advertisers they already have strong relationships with. Web advertising networks can help increase yield and average rates for online advertising and immediately overcome the remnant inventory challenge that many large traffic sites face. With the evolution of behavioural targeting and retargeting techniques the yields of networked sold space can increase to make them highly attractive. This Digital Publishing Strategy Academy workshop covers some of the key factors and acts as a check-list for publishers considering employing an online network
How can online sales houses help web publishers?
Many firms decide they could use the additional help of a sales house to turn part of their remnant inventory into income. Typically a sales house will be able to bring in advertising that the firm cannot normally gather, boosting total revenues and keeping the sales team tightly focussed where it matters most.
Those new clients might be from companies that are outside of the vertical sector that the web publisher specialises in - for example consumer motoring titles will tend to have their clients concentrated in the motoring sector and may not have strong relationships with advertisers who are interested in the demographic of the readerships but from outside that industry. The sales houses might also be able to unlock revenues from other countries if the audiences are large enough – many British and Spanish publishers have high audiences from North America and Latin America, and while their national advertisers may not benefit from exposures to foreign audiences, there are bound to be national advertisers in north and Latin America where those audiences could be profitably sold.
Sometimes sales houses are simply used to offload remnant inventory that could not be sold otherwise, but some publishers may trust them with premium inventory as well. Now that behaviourally targeted advertising ahs become such a powerful driver of online media buying, there’s the additional benefit of making inventory available to behavioural partners and using this to extract a much higher yield for space which otherwise might have had to be sold as low grade ‘run-of-site’.
To help publishers navigate some of the key issues to ask firms, we put together some notes that guide you through some of the steps and the key questions to consider before commissioning. You can download them from this page…
